Santa Maria junior high students ill from smoking spice

May 9, 2015

A handful of students from El Camino Junior High School in Santa Maria became ill after smoking spice on Friday morning.

The mother of one of the five students who smoked spice before school, found her son unresponsive at their home with his eyes open. She then transported her son to Marian Regional Medical Center for treatment.

The remaining four students arrived at school at around 8:30 a.m. where the effects of the drug began to kick in. The students were overly thirsty, one was vomiting and they all had high blood pressure and heart rates.

Emergency medical personnel transported two of the students to the hospital while the other two were picked up by their parents.

Spice is a legal synthetic marijuana commonly sold in smoke shops. Spice is reportedly about 1,000 times stronger than traditional marijuana.

The driver who caused a fatal crash on Highway 1 in Cayucos last October was allegedly addicted to spice and used it prior to the collision. The crash killed two children and sent two adults to the hospital with major injuries

Several Central Coast communities have passed ordinance banning the possession and retail sale of spice in their cities. Atascadero was the first local city to impose a ban followed by Paso Robles, Morro Bay and Guadalupe.

Officials at El Camino Junior High School are conducting an investigation into the use of spice by the five students. The three children who required medical treatment were released from the hospital Friday afternoon.

4 Comments

I call B.S. Kids lie. If a kid gets caught passed out because he took a bad ecstasy pill or a bunch of narcotics, what do you think he’s going to tell his parents to mitigate the consequences? “Oh it was SPICE yeah that’s it!” “Who’d you smoke it with?” and the rest of the story goes from there.

“Spice” is a disgusting and unhealthy drug but it prevents addiction through the fact that it’s so bad that it generally just causes dizziness and headaches. So people need to take these kids stories with a grain of salt if they have no other knowledge.

Yes really, and I think you’re the one being obtuse. First of all, I HAVE tried it, so I have a little knowledge of it’s effects. But different things effect people differently. so let’s just say for a minute that I’m completely wrong and these kids did smoke spice and that is what caused one of them to become unresponsive… then what would that lead you to propose? I’m assuming it would lead you to suggest that spice should be made illegal, right? But that’s the whole source of the problem here! The only reason that kids are smoking this garbage is *because* it’s easier and cheaper than marijuana. Should they be smoking marijuana? NO, but this is where the paradox comes in (and it’s JUST like the things that happened under alcohol prohibition), that when you make one chemical illegal, they will just alter the chemical structure in order to create another one that isn’t covered under the law yet. They can do this ALL DAY LONG, and while the law is chasing each one down to make it illegal, kids are going to be ingesting god knows what because you will NEVER stop kids from being curious and wanting to experiment.

So THAT is why it is important to avoid the hype, and quite frankly just ignore the issue and put efforts toward rolling back prohibition laws in general. At least then there will be some kind of quality control and knowledge about the long term effects of what people are ingesting.

OK now please someone get this right!
Spice is not, never has and never will be a synthetic Marijuana. Synthetic Marijuana exists and it’s called Marinol and is a prescription drug.
Spice is an abomination and needs to be banned.